Thamizoli P. and Balasubramanian K. (2001) Information Management and Knowledge Empowerment: MSSRF Telecenters in South India, in Journal of Development Communication: Special Issue on Telecenters 12[2]
online at http://ip.cals.cornell.edu/commdev/documents/jdc-thamizoli.doc
The article describes the creation and the first months of lives of two telecentres, set up by the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation in the village of Kannivadi and of Samiarpatty in South India. The region economy is base on horticulture and floriculture-based integrated farming systems. Most of the crops cultivated are susceptible to price fluctuations in the markets.
The two centres have been connected through a computer network. Each center has a computer with modem, a phone and a printer.
The foundation organized a number of participatory rural appraisals (PRAs) conducted in the Kannivadi region to have a picture about the patterns of information needs. The main information needs expressed were: improved cultivation techniques in agriculture and horticultural crops, and market details of agricultural products (men); weeding problems in agriculture, education of children, and health care facilities (women); job opportunities outside the villages, and information to start income generation activities; credit information; higher education and vocational training programs (youth).
A survey in every household was also made to study the pattern of network in terms of membership to associations and groups, access to telephones, newspapers, radios, televisions and postal communication systems and literacy, patterns of travel, and information needs.
It is interesting to report the outcome regarding information access: radio, postal communication, newspapers, and telephones have not entered the life of many households directly, television seems to have become a major dimension in the villager’s entertainment. Most of the conventional ICTs such as radios, newspapers and televisions provide macro-level generic information. The micro-level, location-specific information operates through an informal network of transport workers, employees of postal departments, extension officials, schoolchildren and villagers who travel to the district headquarters regularly.
After the need assessment phase micro-plans were produced for both the locations, a leading local organization was chosen for each location and responsibilities were assigned to the village animators and management committee.
The strength of this case study is:
§ the accurate need assessment,
§ the training given to animators in operating the computers, managing Internet, e-mails, scanning, usage of digital camera, MS-Word, Tamil fonts Amutham to prepare documents in the local language, preliminary knowledge of HTML to prepare multimedia folders, simple hardware management techniques, participatory techniques to constantly update the content to meet the needs of different social and economic sectors of the community,
§ the stress on knowledge towards the creation of knowledge repositories (DBs on crops diseases, on villagers skills), the improvement of knowledge access ( relevant web sites DB, transfer of important info in other format), the enhancement of the knowledge environment (training program on specific issues) and the management of knowledge as an asset (monitoring users)